Our Story

Hi, we’re Dan & Rachel Loewenherz, creators of The App Hacker. And we’re on a mission to help programmers get better at what they do, and make more money doing it on their own terms.

Our Story

Dan: I’m a veteran entrepreneur and programmer. I quit my “corporate”, agency job about 10 years ago to strike out on my own, and since then I’ve created a niche in working with amazing startups. I’ve built iOS, Android, and web applications for all kinds of companies, from e-commerce to online dating to hostel management—I’ve seen it all.

I’ve been the first CTO of more companies than I can count, and I’ve brought more than 200 ideas to life. I’ve also helped the teams I’ve worked with (like The Black Tux and Coffee Meets Bagel) raise over $200mm in funding.

It’s been great. By all accounts, I’ve grown an incredibly lucrative and rewarding consulting business. I work from home, bill out at over $300 / hour for most working hours of my day, and get to hang out with Rachel all day long (trust me, it’s awesome!).

Rachel: I started out as a market researcher, helping Fortune 500s make decisions about what to sell, how to price, and how to advertise. After getting burnt out by the consulting life, I moved into software product marketing at Dell, which had way better work-life balance, but was…boring.

For years, I watched Dan help startups who struggled to make decisions without really good data in their back pocket – and without much process to guide them. So about two years ago, I quit the corporate world to grow the business with Dan – and believe me, I’ve never looked back.

I’ve always loved to optimize, so started taking notes on what makes our approach to building apps unique, and how we do business – from how we get clients, keep them happy, get paid, and more. And this helped us improve our consulting practice in a huge way.

Dan: But we realized this information would be worth so much more if we shared it with the world. It’s a little risky, sure, since a lot of this is what others might consider our “secret sauce”, but we decided it was worth sharing anyways. We open source much of our code, so why not open source the way we do business? And that’s how The App Hacker was born.